Where the Night Watchman hadn't succeeded, the college entrance exam did. Faced with this test paper, Zong Yan was filled with fear.
Wait a minute, what was going on? How did he suddenly appear in the exam room of the college entrance exam?
Zong Yan's brain was full of fog.
When he went to Pohnpei to deal with the mess created by the R'lyeh sect, there was more than a month remaining before the college entrance exam. Was it possible that when he returned to his original world, his progress on the timeline had suddenly accelerated because of all the time travel he'd done?
He crossed through spatial barriers twice, and there wasn't much time in between. Zong Yan was feeling light-headed, but there weren't many other side effects. He just felt dizzy as he sat in his seat.
Zong Yan couldn't help thinking it was like something from a dream.
He suddenly woke up to find himself sitting in the college entrance exam room totally unprepared. He was forced to go into battle without any chance to review.
He couldn't imagine a worse situation.
He stared at the questions on the test paper and leaned over to pick up the pen that fell to the floor. Suddenly the sound of high heels sounded in the quiet exam room.
"Don't move from your seat. The teacher will pick up the pen for you."
The exam proctor standing at the lectern pushed up his glasses. A pair of eyes like a falcon swept across the seats and settled on Zong Yan.
The strictness of conditions inside the college entrance exam room should require no elaboration. There were two teachers present. One stood at the podium and watched from the front, while a second teacher walked around the classroom and kept an eye on things from behind. The exam room had stringent monitoring, and patrolling teachers wearing assignment badges occasionally passed by the classroom windows outside.
Each of the college entrance exam students were buried in the exam questions. A few students had already been warned by the proctor for looking to the right or left. If it happened again, their names would be taken down.
Thanks to these hiccups, the test takers in this exam room were on edge, placing their entire focus on the black-and-white test paper in front of them.
This exam wouldn't just affect the first half of their lives. It was the culmination of their entire twelve-year learning career. The biggest thing on their minds was the lack of time. None of them thought there was enough.
As the teacher helped Zong Yan pick up his ink pen and set it on his desk, her eyes swept over the test sheets that were laid flat in front of him.
The first page was completely blank, and there were only forty minutes left before the end of the exam. Not a single character was written on the answer sheet.
Had this candidate given up? Was he going to hand in a blank exam?
The teacher looked over at the examinee and saw what seemed to be a thin layer of sweat on the shapely bridge of his nose. The student's face didn't look good. His face was so pale it almost blended into the exam paper.
"Student, are you not feeling well?"
"It's okay. I'm fine. Thank you for your concern."
The black-haired teen calmly took out a tissue from the see-through document pouch beside him and wiped his face.
Some of his black hair was a little too long and fell onto his forehead, making it hard to see his expression at the moment.
"It's okay. Just hurry up and answer the questions. Don't give up. There's only about half an hour left until the end of the exam."
Since he said he was all right, the proctor didn't pursue it.
The importance of the college entrance exam for students couldn't be overstated. Every year, there were some candidates with poor mental fortitude who fell apart inside the test room. The teacher had been proctoring the college entrance exam for several years, and she'd seen it happen before. Since the candidate said he was fine, she didn't pay much attention.
It was only after the proctor left that Zong Yan flipped through the exam with slightly trembling fingers.
201X National Unified Examination for Admission to Higher Education Institutions (Jiangsu Version)
201X was the correct year for Zong Yan's college entrance exam, because in 2020 Jiangsu province would switch to the national version and no longer design its own test questions. Before that, this region of the country had undergone several reforms of the college entrance exam process, including large-scale changes such as the Five Reforms in Ten Years initiative.
And the difficulty of the Jiangsu exam, especially for math and English, had always been recognized nationwide. The combined science exam might be a little easier, but the mathematics section was unbelievably hard.
During the 2010s, the Jiangsu exam followed a "3 + academic level test + comprehensive quality assessment" model. It wasn't the same as the national exam.
Zong Yan was enrolled in Qingyang High School in Jiangzhou. Jiangzhou had withdrawn from the Jiangsu exam a few years before and adopted the national exam, with a standard full score of 750. Jiangzhou no longer had anything to do with the Jiangsu exam.
Since he was taking the college entrance exam right now, why was he staring at the hellishly difficult Jiangsu version?
Zong Yan couldn't believe his eyes. He took out his admission card and stared at it.
Okay, everything looked correct. The listed school was Qingyang High School. There was nothing wrong.
There was only one possible explanation for the current situation. He wasn't in his original world.
He moved his hand to his chest and felt the warmth of the key sliding down and landing gently on his wrist.
The Sun God, the King of Clouds, the Night Watchman... What came next?
The moment his thoughts paused, a vast and magnificent star map unfolded in his mind.
Thousands of flashing stars burst into light, shining with the interwoven, spectral glow of destiny, brilliant against a dark and eternal backdrop.
A mysterious, enigmatic ascendant planet hovered in his sea of consciousness, and as it rotated, the stars flared ever more brightly.
This image was visible only to Zong Yan. As his thoughts moved, the shining stars on the map fell onto his blank test paper one after another. Zong Yan only had to glance at the stars in his mind to see the answer to the test question.
The process was difficult to describe. For multiple choice questions, for example, the stars directly landed on the correct answer. Zong Yan slowly worked through one of the questions with his own brain, which was totally unprepared for the exam, and checked it in detail. The stars were indeed correct.
Zong Yan: ...
I thought the Jiangsu version didn't have multiple choice questions? So where did this exam come from? It's a fake, right???
Hold on. The Astrologer's card didn't have any combat effectiveness, which was why he never thought it was as useful as other cards that could fight and kill. He never imagined it concealed such an incredible advantage.
Zong Yan was in awe.
Even if the Silver Key was burning in the palm of his hand right now, guiding Zong Yan to leave this world, Zong Yan's instincts as a student refused to let him leave the exam room by handing in a blank answer sheet.
What was in front of him right now was a math exam.
Usually the Chinese test was held on the morning of the first day of the college entrance exam, and the math test was in the afternoon. On the second day, the comprehensive test was in the morning with English in the afternoon.
Although he didn't know the exact test procedures or regulations for the Jiangsu version, he knew that when the math test ended, the exam room door would open. Zong Yan might as well finish the math test. There would be time to find his way back afterwards.
'I'm already here. Whatever. The Astrologer card will help, so why not try the Jiangsu version.'
As he thought this, he settled down, picked up a 2B pencil, and began to fill out the answer sheet.
Although the Astrologer card could point to the answers for multiple choice questions, it couldn't help with the fill-in-the-blank questions and hand-written questions that followed, right?
Zong Yan soon discovered he was wrong.
The Astrologer was a persona card that calculated fate. The card didn't give Zong Yan any actual superpowers, but it boosted his brain into overdrive. Complemented by a star chart that updated in real time, he determined the trajectory of the stars like a super CPU, computing faster than any computer AI. Using the incredibly complex, ancient, and mysterious astrological formulas of the universe, he arrived at answers that revealed what was to come.
It was equivalent to increasing Zong Yan's brain capacity several times.
What did that mean?
It meant that when Zong Yan came to the final multi-part math question, his mind took a fraction of a second to solve all three sub-questions point by point.
How difficult could the college entrance exam paper be compared to calculating destiny? Forget about the college entrance exam, Zong Yan could use the Astrologer card to participate in the IMO. A gold medal perfect score would be absolutely no problem. To exaggerate a little more, as long as it gave him the formulas and smoothed out the logical sequence of steps, he could solve every mathematics and physics problem in the history of humankind in short order.
The Astrologer daily disposable persona card absolutely slayed in the exam room.
The proctor reached the back of the classroom and looked down to straighten her clothes. At that point, the sound of a beep came over the loudspeaker.
"Examinees, please note there are now fifteen minutes left until the end of the exam. Please fill in your answer sheet as soon as possible before the time is up."
The moment the tone ended, there was a burst of tension on the faces of the examinees. The sound of 2B pencils scribbling and pens scratching on test paper grew much louder.
This test was the end result of the painstaking efforts of the examinees. So many years of hard work and study had gone into getting the highest possible score, all in order to be able to attend the school of their dreams. No one dared to be careless.
Among all the rustling sounds, Zong Yan stopped writing. He instinctively stretched out in his seat, a movement which appeared quite abrupt.
The proctor remembered this handsome-looking examinee, so she walked over again and rapped on the desk with her knuckles. "Check it over carefully. Don't do anything unrelated to the exam in your exam seat in the exam room."
"Okay, teacher. Thank you for reminding me."
Zong Yan was thinking smoothly and had just finished the exam. Right now he felt steady and relaxed and had instinctively stretched out his back. After the proctor's reminder, he gave a contrite smile and retracted his outstretched arms.
The teacher frowned, recalling the blank answer sheet she'd seen before. She'd previously classified Zong Yan as a poor student who was desperate and stressed out.
But just as she was about to leave, her eyes accidentally scanned the answer sheet he'd set on the desk.
The test booklet was laid out flat, so all the proctor saw was the dense series of words written on the back.
From the first multi-part question to the final one, none of the proofs he'd written were very long, especially the last sub-part of the final question. The student had only written a short paragraph.
The teacher taught mathematics. A little while ago at the podium she'd looked at the test paper of one of the absent students and got an idea of the general solution to the last multi-part question.
The last question should take half a page to prove. If you wrote anything shorter, you probably had no chance.
But when she saw Zong Yan's answer, it became harder and harder to conceal the surprise on her face.
The solution to the problem was laid out step by step. Although the proof wasn't very long, each word cut straight to the point. It was an extremely difficult problem, but the student had disassembled it in his own bizarre way. Broken down in such a fashion, the result was incredibly smooth.
"It's time to hand in your papers. Please stop writing."
After the bell rang, the proctor was still immersed in the solution. But when she turned around, she saw the black-haired young man had already picked up his document pouch and walked out of the exam room without looking back.
---
The author has something to say:
Zong Yan: I was wrong, I had no idea the Astrologer was a student's best friend
---
TL Notes:
full of "fog" - 浆糊 - paste, dough
Jiangsu exam - According to a discussion on Zhihu, the Jiangsu version of the exam in use before 2021 had a maximum of 480 points, while the exam used by most other provinces has a standard 750 points. The Jiangsu exam was more heavily weighted towards mathematics, and the mathematics section was widely known to be fiendishly difficult
Five Reforms in Ten Years - 十年五改 - An educational initiative in Jiangsu province, apparently related to changes to the college entrance exam, but may have involved other things. It was hard to find details
3 + academic level test + comprehensive quality assessment - "3" refers to the core subjects of mathematics, English, and Chinese which all students are tested on. The points available for these three exams differed for science track vs. liberal arts track students. The "academic level test" had compulsory and elective components. The compulsory section was held in the second year of high school and could theoretically be taken twice, but it was scheduled at almost the same time as the college entrance exam, which made retaking it difficult. For the elective section, candidates chose two optional tests in history, politics, chemistry, biology, physics, geography, etc. In the "3 + 1 + 2" test model followed by other provinces, physics is mandatory for science track students like Zong Yan
IMO - International Mathematical Olympiad
2003 General Higher Education Entrance Examination for National Unification Examination (Jiangsu Paper) Mathematics Test Questions, page 1:
Image source: Zhihu.com
Multiple choice questions were removed from the Jiangsu math exam after 2003 and replaced with fill-in-the-blank and short answer questions